Ashoka Youth Years

In a world of constant change, how will your home, school, community, or workplace adapt if outdated approaches continue to determine how young people grow-up; how they demonstrate leadership; and how they pursue solutions to the problems around them?

HOW?

By ensuring every child masters empathy for changemaking, we are influencing a foundational skill critical for young people. This ensures that as they grow, they identify issues they are passionate about in their communities (empathy) design solutions for them (leadership) and build teams to work with  (Teamwork), they build resilience and intrinsic motivation (entrepreneurship) to continue creating positive change.

Institutions, leaders and influencers in various fields also play a key role in supporting and creating favorable environments for young people to be and practice changemaking hence an important stakeholder in our endeavor to ensure that young person in East Africa self-identify as a Changemaker as well as practices Empathy for the good of all. 

What if today’s organizations and institutions--which are meant to value youth--continue to hire new talent and recruit students based on status quo criteria, out of sync with our current world of constant change?

At Ashoka, we know that in order for young people to succeed in today’s world of accelerating change, they must have experiences to practice empathy, lead collaboratively, and organize in a "team of teams" culture to actualize creative solutions to the challenges around them.

HOW WE WORK

Youth Years programs and strategies ensure that today’s young people—and the youth ecosystem that supports them—are ready and equipped to lead and thrive in the new game. Below is a snapshot of some of our diverse program offerings that we co-create with schools/educators, youth, universities, parents, and companies:

• Ashoka Young Changemakers: Ashoka's Youth Years program working with Ashoka Fellows and partners around the world to search for and select young people between ages 12 to 18 who have launched projects that have a social benefit, a strong sense of the Everyone a Changemaker vision, and are active peer influencers, inspiring and leading the changemaker revolution.

• Your Kids: works with corporations to foster employee/parent support for their kids becoming changemakers. Simultaneously, this initiative helps to build a changemaker culture within these corporations. The Your Kids program can also be used with teachers to help their students become changemakers, or with other citizen sector organizations to help their organizations help young people become changemakers.

• Stories of Young Changemaking: What if every young person knew they had the power to create change for the good of all wherever they are – in their school, their neighborhood, their city or beyond?  The answer? Solutions would outrun problems.  Our communities would be fairer, more just, happier and healthier.  Ours would be an Everyone a Changemaker world. Ashoka has developed a series of stories about young people changing their worlds and successful adults who started things in their teens. Through their experience, they found their power for life.

• Peer-to peer learning: and activation for young people to be changemakers through our Changemaker Societies, or, serving on our The Global Youth Advisory Council.

OUR MEASURES OF IMPACT...

Impact for youth changemaking is not solely determined by one project for social innovation or one story. We ambitiously define successful impact as mind-set shifts at scale where social behaviors change. Our theory of youth changemaking is guided by whether or not a young person individually, school-wide, or other youth community-wide knows they are changemakers. This is necessary for stepping towards Ashoka’s vision of an “Everyone a Changemaker” world.

1. What proportion of 12-year-olds or 15-year-olds know that they are changemakers?
2. What percentages of the stakeholders in a school (or other youth community) know that they have a successful or failing community depending on whether or not it is an “Everyone a Changemaker” culture?